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User blog:SiBurning/Playing on the PC
My main game is running on my laptop using Bluestacks. I thought it crashed a lot until I installed the game on my rooted Nook HD+ tablet. The game crashes on the tablet even more. I'm also playing other games on a second emulator, Genymotion. I recommend Bluestacks over Genymotion for casual gamers. Bluestacks is more stable, and the free version is made for gamers. It does have several shortcomings. You can only set it to two fixed screen sizes. You can't zoom without reaching for the keyboard. You can only install one emulator. One emuator means you have to share those free sword offers across all your games. Bluestacks also recently started playing advertisements between app switches. They don't quite have this under control. The ads sometimes play inside a game, for example when a dialog comes up. Some games come up with a blank screen and need to be restarted until there's no ad. Other aps just plain crash when an ad is played. And the ads interfere with attempts to use Kiwi's free offers. Instead of going to Google's Play Store, you end up in an ad and the installer doesn't work. You might be able to work around this by selecting the game from the "running apps" menu--it may or may not continue on to the Play Store. Want a good illustration of ads running even inside an app? I was in the Android Settings App, uninstalling some of those free-offer games, and an advertising video came up when I hit the back button to go back to the app screen. Keep in mind that all of these ads are video. For most of us, video bandwidth isn't an issue on a PC, but consider yourself warned. Bluestacks also hogs the PC Virtualization (called UAC Virtualization in Windows), so Windows users can't run a second application that uses virtualization. Mac users needn't worry because Apple got this right, but Windows only allows one application to use virtualization at a time. (That's not quite true, but the precise nature of this limit isn't clear to me.) If you need to start another emulator, you must stop the Bluestacks Android Service and kill the HD-Agent.exe (and any other HD-xxx) process--you'll know them if you right click in Windows Task Manager and see a checkmark by UAC Virtualization. One big problem with Bluestacks is that the game crashes after visiting a few neighbors. Sometimes, I can get to 10 towns, other times only 2 or 3. Genymotion is faster, handles graphics better, allows you to resize the screen to any size, and--my favorite feature--you can zoom using the right mouse button which means you never need touch the keyboard unless you want to type actual words. On the down side, it's not as stable as Bluestacks, and needs to be restarted more or less frequently, depending on the game. Genymotion also has a good ARM emulator, which allows me to play some games that won't run on Bluestacks. Genymotion allows you to download several "devices", including phones and tablets, some with and some without Google Play. Finally, you can run several Genymotion emulators at the same time, so if you install one game per device you won't need to share the free offers. Category:Blog posts